Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Even in domestic policy, Gomulka did not dare to transcend the limits of timid reformism. He refused to recognize the party’s responsibility for the economic morass and continued to cling to the dogmas of the central plan. Ideologically, Gomulka advocated the hegemony of Marxism-Leninism. He staunchly opposed a genuine dialogue with the Catholic Church, which he considered a monolithic “reactionary” bloc, and simply tried to contain its influence. As for the Church, it was a magnet for many of those who saw communist rule as government imposed by a foreign power. The innovations Gomulka permitted resulted in a softening of the domestic repression, a slowdown in industrial investments, and greater tolerance for intellectual and artistic experimentation. An out-and-out break with Stalinism would have been too ambitious and difficult for Gomulka. At the most, his dream was to reinvigorate the system, not to replace it. Certainly, during his first years in power, the climate in Poland was more relaxed than in the other East European countries, but political pluralism remained a mere desideratum. Gomulka capitalized on the existing malaise and promised a rapid economic recovery. He managed to deceive many intellectuals, who took him for a genuine enemy of Stalinism and applauded his coming to power.

  In fact, Gomulka had no sympathy for or understanding of those who advocated a revolutionary change of the system. Basically, he was satisfied with the existing institutional framework and did not have the slightest intention of tolerating its overthrow. Without being a dogmatic of the Bierut or Rakosi type, he was even less a heretic. He looked askance at the turbulent workers’ councils in Polish industry, which threatened the party’s constituted authority. At the moment he consolidated his power within the communist hierarchy, Gomulka proceeded to curb spontaneous development from below and to restore the party’s overall control over society. In 1957 he unleashed a purge against revisionist intellectuals, whom he accused of trying to undermine the socialist order. Freedom of the press, a Polish reality of the previous year, was severely curtailed. The proponents of democratic socialism were denied access to publication; their revisionism became the target of officially engineered slander campaigns. The revisionist position was formulated in a crystal-clear manner by Leszek Kolakowski, then a young philosophy professor at the University of Warsaw. In a short text entitled “What is Socialism?”—which was banned by the Gomulka regime—Kolakowski offered a provocative series of negative definitions of socialism, thereby pointing out what he considered to be the true content of the concept of socialism. With remarkable poignancy and wit, Kolakowski highlighted the most important elements of the revisionist creed:

  Socialism is not:

  A society in which a person who has committed no crime sits at home waiting for the police.

  A society in which one person is unhappy because he says what he thinks, and another happy because he does not say what he is in his mind.

  A society in which a person lives better because he does not think at all.

  A state whose neighbors curse geography.

  A state which wants all its citizens to have the same opinions in philosophy, foreign policy, economics, literature, and ethics.

  A state whose government defines its citizens’ rights, but whose citizens do

  not define the government’s rights.

  A state in which there is private ownership of the means of production.

  A state which considers itself solidly socialist because it had liquidated private ownership of the means of production.

  A state which always knows the will of the people before it asks them.

  A state in which the philosophers and writers always say the same as the generals and the ministers, but always after them.

  A state in which the returns of parliamentary elections are always predictable.

  A state which does not like its citizens to read back numbers of newspapers.23

  This mordant definition of what socialism is not offered one of the most accurate diagnoses of the dismal conditions imposed by the communists on the East European nations. While in Poland Gomulka managed to contain and neutralize the rebellious ferment, in Hungary a popular movement succeeded in toppling the old order and ushering in a truly pluralistic society.

  FREEDOM RECONQUERED: IMRE NAGY AND THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION

  On June 16, 1989, a solemn ceremony took place in Budapest. For more than thirty years, Imre Nagy and the other martyrs of the 1956 revolution had been besmirched by the Kadar regime’s propaganda as fomenters of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy. Now, the leaders of Hungary’s 1956 revolution were finally granted a proper burial. In the meantime, the official stories told to justify those who had betrayed the revolution and colluded with the Soviet invaders fell apart. Janos Kadar, the man who had accepted the Soviet diktat and had led the country for three decades, had been forced to resign at a party conference one year earlier. The new leaders, headed by General Secretary Karoly Grosz and Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, were striving to gain authority by resuming the interrupted tradition of reform communism. With Gorbachev in the Kremlin, the times were opportune for their break with the ludicrous description of the 1956 uprising as a counterrevolution. From within the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, there was growing demand for the rehabilitation of Imre Nagy and his comrades. The maverick reformer Imre Pozsgay, head of the liberal wing within the party elite, and Rezsö Nyers, the father of the economic reform of the early 1970s, joined the country’s democratic opposition in its demand for the restoration of truth regarding the 1956 national uprising.

  When the reform-oriented Hungarian communists tried to join in the mourning procession, they heard the following irreverent, even defiant statement by Victor Orban, one of the leaders of the FIDESZ, the Federation of Young Democrats, a new political party unashamed of its anticommunist convictions:

  We young people fail to understand many things that are obvious to the older generations. We are puzzled that those who were so eager to slander the Revolution and Imre Nagy have suddenly become the greatest supporters of the former prime minister’s policies. Nor do we understand why the party leaders who saw to it that we were taught from books that falsified the Revolution are now rushing to touch the coffins as if they were goodluck charms. We need not be grateful for their permission to bury our martyrs after thirty-one years; nor do we have to thank them for allowing our political organizations to function.24

  In its deliberate abrasiveness, Orban’s statement betokened the immense gap between the revisionist illusions of the previous generations and the unambiguous refusal to embrace any form of communism on the part of Hungary’s youth. The communist party was not to be credited with anything: It had ruled the country against the people’s will, and no one had to be grateful for its sudden discovery of the principles of tolerance. Imre Nagy’s reburial in June 1989 was thus a symbolic farewell to the idea of intrasystemic reforms. Instead of gradual change from within, the battle cry was now a resolute break with the communist system and the establishment of a pluralist order based on a free market and accountable government. More than thirty years earlier, Nagy himself had been the forerunner of this revolutionary approach. In a time of immense personal risk, he had shown the courage to embrace the cause of the plebeians against the communist oppressors.

  The intelligentsia played a leading role in the earlier Hungarian antitotalitarian outburst, and for many reasons: First, the intelligentsia had been subjected, throughout the Stalinist years, to particularly vicious measures of persecution; second, its representatives considered themselves the repository of national values debased under Stalinism; third, as an enlightened elite, with certain revolutionary traditions going back to the social and national upheaval of 1848, the intelligentsia considered itself entitled to assume a leading role in the struggle against despotism; and fourth, large segments of the Polish and Hungarian intelligentsias who had espoused the values of Marxism had grown disenchanted with the manipulation of those values by the ruling bureaucracies.

  As for the indus
trial workers, they were initially captivated by the communist promises of social justice and equality. The collectivistic ethos of early communism is Eastern Europe and the personnel policy favoring people with working-class social background served precisely to create the feeling that workers were indeed the ruling group in society. In turn, this form of exclusiveness contributed to a widening gulf between workers and intellectuals: The former perceived the latter as troublemakers, while the intellectuals considered the workers the main social base for a most suffocating regime. It was only later, in the 1970s, that organic cooperation became possible between the radical wings of both the intelligentsia and the industrial working class. By 1956 intellectuals were looking for support in the communist parties’ antidogmatic wing. In Poland they tried to mobilize on their side people from the Gomulka faction. In Hungary, because the leadership seemed completely subjugated by the unrepentant Stalinists headed by Rakosi and his lackeys, the critical intellectuals looked to Imre Nagy and his partisans. Another element that had a cardinal influence for the coalescence of radical reformism was the contagious effect of Titoism in Eastern Europe. Tito’s repudiation of Stalinism was regarded as a strategy to be emulated, and the Yugoslavs did not conceal their sympathy for the East European revisionists. Reformism in Eastern Europe in 1956 started as an attempt to solve structural contradictions and tensions within the existing matrix of authority and domination. It did not include, at least in its original formulations by people like Nagy or even Kolakowski, the desire to overthrow the system. The thrust of the struggle was political in that it emphasized the possibility of reformation within the status quo. Because of its failure to embrace global grievances and champion the national rejection of communism, revisionism could not embody a full-fledged and convincing alternative to the communist regime.25

  One of the best analyses of both the grandeur and the limits of Marxist revisionism was provided by Adam Michnik, the celebrated Polish historian and civil rights activist. In his essay “A New Evolutionism,” Michnik scrutinized the nature of the revisionist wave in Poland, but his conclusions are valid for the other East European countries as well. According to Michnik, the revisionist fallacy stemmed from this group’s idealization of the communist party’s aptitude and readiness for structural change:

  The revisionist concept was based on a specific intraparty perspective. It was never formulated into a political program. It assumed that the system of power could be humanized and democratized and that the official Marxist doctrine was capable of assimilating contemporary arts and social sciences. The revisionists wanted to act within the framework of the communist party and Marxist doctrine. They wanted to transform “from within” the doctrine and the party in the direction of reform and common sense.26

  The main weakness of the revisionists, Michnik insisted, originated in their lack of a radical oppositional platform. Sharing the Marxist illusions with the powers-that-be, the revisionists could not realize that only such a program for sweeping change could provide them with a mass base: The “revisionists’ greatest sin lay not in their defeat in the intraparty struggle for power (where they could not win) but in the character of that defeat. It was the defeat of individuals being eliminated from positions of power and influence, not a setback for a broadly based leftist and democratic political platform.”27

  Only in Hungary did the social movement from below outrun the expectations and objectives of the revisionist faction. A conjunction of factors, among which was Imre Nagy’s personal decision to embrace the demands of the popular uprising, turned this movement into a revolution against totalitarianism. Hungary of 1956 was the first case in Eastern Europe where violence was used by the masses in self-defense against the repression waged by foreign troops. It is important to stress that the Hungarian revolution was not a reactionary movement aiming to restore the ancien régme, but an outburst of popular rage against the usurpation of the ideals of justice and equality by the communist bureaucracy. The first post—World War II democratic revolution in Eastern Europe, it created a model and a tradition that was to influence all the antitotalitarian social movements in the region for the subsequent decades.

  The course of events that led to the revolutionary explosion was definitely accelerated by the stubborness and blatant ineptitude of the Hungarian communist elite under Rakosi and Gerö. In 1955, after the two years of experimentation in the “New Course” policy, Imre Nagy was demoted, and the Rakosi faction tried to reestablish full domination over the country. It was too late, however, for those dyed-in-the-wool Stalinists to restore their domination: The signals coming from Moscow were extremely confusing and were of no help against the powerful wind of change affecting the whole region. On the other hand, during the two years of Nagy’s premiership, Hungarian intellectuals had experienced a sense of freedom that they refused to renounce under the party’s pressure. Undeterred by Rakosi’s threats and sick of the official lies, they engaged in a search for truth that was aptly called the “revolt of the mind.”28 For a mass revolutionary movement to develop, several premises were indispensable. First, such a challenge to communist authority is unthinkable as long as the communist elite remains monolithically cohesive. In other words, for a social crisis to become a political crisis in Soviet-type regimes, communist elites must split on ideological and personal issues. In Hungary, the conflict between the Stalinist hard-liners headed by the Rakosi—Gerö team and the revisionist faction led by Nagy made possible the mounting attacks against the police state. Another condition for such a crisis to develop into a revolutionary situation is the erosion of party authority. The revelations about the Stalinist atrocities, especially Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” ruined Rakosi’s political credibility. Instead of trying to co-opt the revisionists, the Hungarian leaders intensified their campaigns against the rebellious party members and initiated new witch-hunts against critical intellectuals. That perceived debility in the ruling group emboldened the leadership’s opponents. A broad coalition could be formed among intellectuals, students, and representatives of the industrial working class. By the summer of 1956, the political and cultural scene in Budapest was dominated by heated debates on such basic issues as the history of the communist party, freedom of the press, and rehabilitation of the victims of the Stalinist terror in Hungary. An example of this rise in civil life was the Petöfi Circle. Members of the Nagy faction inspired the Petöfi Circle, a discussion group created to debate the issues associated with the democratization of public life and methods to overcome the Stalinist legacy. Thus Nagy’s supporters could publicize the ideas expressed by the former Prime Minister in a memorandum addressed to the party leadership in the first months of 1956. According to Nagy, the further development of socialism required a new approach to Marxism. Instead of being revered as a sacrosanct dogma, that philosophy had to adjust itself to changing realities. Moreover, Nagy claimed, socialism was threatened by the degeneration of political power in the Soviet-style regimes, where the people’s democracy “is obviously being replaced by a party dictatorship, which does not rely on Party membership, but relies on a personal dictatorship and attempts to make the party apparatus, and through it the Party membership, a mere tool of this dictatorship.” According to Nagy, this authoritarian regime did not have anything to do with humane socialism: “Its power is not permeated by the spirit of socialism or democratism, but by a Bonapartist spirit of minority dictatorship. Its aims are not determined by Marxism, the teachings of scientific socialism, but by autocratic views that are maintained at any cost and by any means.”29

  In Nagy’s statement one can identify all the themes of the revisionist mythology: On the one hand, he denounced the party’s absolutist grip on power as illegitimate and inherently antidemocratic. On the other hand, he stuck to the interpretation of “scientific socialism” as a doctrine of human emancipation, without noticing that the principal source of the oppressive conditions he deplored was precisely the ideological pretense to omniscience and infallibility cha
racteristic of Marxist historical determinism. Such themes notwithstanding, Nagy challenged the “Bonapartist, individual dictatorship” in the name of a humane version of socialism based on a “constitutional, legal system of the people’s democracy, with its legislature and government, with the democracy of our entire state and social life.”30 In the discussions within the Petöfi Circle those theses were further developed to an extent that went beyond Nagy’s stated goals. Writers and journalists participating in the discussions did not feel constrained by the Bolshevik logic of party discipline. Unlike Nagy, they recognized the root of evil in the very ideology that had justified the monopolization of power by a gang of bloodthirsty bureaucrats. For instance, in one discussion Tibor Dery, a writer who had long been active in the revolutionary movement, raised his voice against the system that had made possible the Stalinist crimes: